Here’s one of many images from Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young’s theatrical tour de force, Betroffenheit, I can’t, and don’t want to get out of my brain. Tiffany Tregarthen, in a gold lame two-piece romper and white face, dances a nightmarish little vaudeville duet with Young to Irving Berlin’s A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody, faint and crackling, an earworm for all time.

It’s the kind of character-driven, movement-based epiphany that Tregarthen and her partner in art and life, David Raymond, are so good at, as dancers and also as dance makers. Their latest work, Major Motion Picture, which will have its Vancouver debut at the Firehall Arts Centre this month, is also character focused, built through a three-year research period and a tryout in Victoria in January.

As the title suggest, Major Motion Picture is heavily influenced by cinema. But it is also a direct offshoot of Out Innerspace Dance Theatre’s last creation, Me So You So Me, a highly stylized duet by and for Tregarthen and Raymond, which mashed up Korean pop music, Japanese manga, kabuki and mime. Cartoon coloured in black, white and red, this visually unusual work was also emotionally penetrating, a body-centred love story about the gaze of the other, and what that mirror shows, and hides.

In Major Motion Picture, some of these themes play out with a larger cast, seven dancers in total playing 14 roles. There are onstage characters, inspired by Chaplin, who Tregarthen says “move by accessing their own desires. They play with the notion of clown, with a detailed articulation in the spine, limbs and faces.” There are offstage characters too, and these “respond differently, by clear physical rules. They reflect different emotions and expectations in their bodies.” A conflict creating character is played by multiple dancers. There is a structural complexity to the work, with its core intentions only really becoming clear to the choreographers after the Victoria premiere.

“For David and me, because we also perform”, says Tregarthen, “a huge turning point comes when a work premieres, when we commit as performers, rather than creators. Those two shows revealed to us what the work was trying to be. What resonated for us as performers is the need for a deeper embodiment of the characters, deeper in the body.”

The idea of masking is central to Major Motion Picture, which also costumes the body with projections, sound and movement. “All these elements are used to mask the body, in ways good and bad,” says Tregarthen. “So we are exploring the notion of mask as disguise, mask as an opportunity to say something you couldn’t otherwise, mask as propaganda. All this comes directly from Me So You So Me. There we built movement as the DNA for a character. In the new work, we are using the same approach as a way to comment on security, comfort and privilege.”

Propaganda, territory, surveillance — these are just some of the big themes that Out Innerspace tackles in Major Motion Picture. Tregarthen and Raymond bring to the task a full toolkit, as dancers, choreographers and teachers (in addition to their own practice, they run Modus Operandi, a highly regarded pre-professional contemporary dance training program).

“David and I know that we are employed for the same skill sets we use in our own work, the same interests, characteristics, ability to self-direct,” Tregarthen said. “For example, by putting on a clown face in Betroffenheit in a work with larger hybrid aspirations and abilities, it helps me to develop my own practice. With a director like Crystal and a collaborator like Jon, you get such clear vision, history and craft. You can bring everything to the table.”

“It is incredibly auspicious timing, how things came together. Betroffeneheit was in the works for three years, Modus Operandi is a four year program, and Major Motion Picture is a three year undertaking. We’re bouncing our practice through different scenarios. I really do think it is that combination of dancer, choreographer, teacher, that combination of roles, that accounts for the wind we feel in our sails right now.”

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